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Dale,
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Thank you for contacting DeLorme Technical Support.*
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Currently our development department has not notified us of plans to produce an inReach and Earthmate application which will be compatible with Blackberry smartphones.
This may be a future development, however at this time we may only speculate as to a time frame.
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If you have any further questions or issues, please reply to this e-mail.
The above response was to my question regarding. A BB app comparable to iPhone which would enable a two way satellite communications for the adventurous outdoors person.
Sucks...keep the pressure up! Might be able to side load the android version...I will try next week when mine comes back.
I'm not sure that DeLorme is aware that there is a BlackBerry user need/demand for their product. There maybe some need to address this issue via email campaign.
Yeah...Not sure why the hassle really...BB provides all the tools to convert from android. I and several other's (including Kevin from this site) are going through the same thing with Sonos. Keep writing...I joined their forum as well to try and keep it in their minds and get others talking...
I kept a 4s around just for the inReach too...would be nice to cancel it as that is the only reason I keep it activated.
Guys Guys ! Settle down.....
In my view, developers fall into two camps. There's the dreamers that want to share their fantastic products with the world and then there's the "show me the money" guys. It's clear Delorme falls in the latter category.
We're going to see many companies that are simply not going to invest in developing a product until there is a critical mass of product on the street. How many BB10's are out there ? 500K....I million ? They're going to wait until there is a clear business case that will ensure a return on their investment.
Thankfully there are also a number of dreamers in this community that see bigger picture and willing to take the risk. The best way to attract more apps to BB10 is to sell more BB10's !
I sent a note to DeLorme and posted in their forums. Here's an excerpt from the forum. I sent a similar email directly to them.
"If I were DeLorme and I had an appetite for developing for a third OS, I would go Blackberry OS10. There are several reasons. First, like BlackBerry, DeLorme, and in particular, the InReach product, is a niche product geared towards communication. Its the same for the BBOS10 devices. They are designed around the task of communication with highly integrated messaging capabilities, both for the enterprise and a wide variety of other messaging infrastructures. InReach would integrate quite well into the 'hub" concept baked into BBOS10. They also appeal to a very similar demographic, that is highly connected folks for whom messaging is a very high priority and who are willing to pay a premium for a messaging anywhere capability.
Secondly, BlackBerry OS10 is based on QNX, which BlackBerry is touting as the foundation of its mobile computing platform. This goes beyond phone and tablets and has been baked into devices like OEM automotive infotainment systems. Manufacturers running QNX Car include Acura, Audi, BMW, Chrysler, Hyundai, GM, Land Rover and Porsche. So development for BBOS10 can be leveraged to integrate inReach into the automotive space.
There are lots of other reason they might develop for BlackBerry including the battery life and QWERTY keyboard baked into the just released Q10.
Lastly, unlike apps that monetize themselves, an app for inReach is really designed to push incremental inReach sales, so the calculus for developing an app like this is quite different than the normal app revenue model. We re not talking about hundreds of thousands of downloads here, we are talking about driving the sales of perhaps thousands of $299 units and the services that surround them. DeLorme would have to decide at some point how much additional demand would be created by development of an app and they would have to consider the cost for development and support of that app.
This leads me to the last point, which is the cost of development. If the inReach Android app could run under the BBOS10 Android player, this would be a nearly no cost issue for DeLorme. The app could be repackaged and released with little to no additional development. It could even be sideloaded by the consumer with no involvement from DeLorme at all. But, the Android player in BB10 is not compatible with DeLorme's Andriod app. BlackBerry limited the API's available within the player for security purposes, and functions critical to the app don't work. Additionally, the app, even if it did work, wouldn't be available within the enterprise partition of the phone if it were run as a repackaged Andriod app.
The best route would be a port of the IoS app under BlackBerry's Cascades UI. Apple's Xcode and Blackberry's Momentic's IDE are quite similar, and depending on how the app was built, porting from IoS is not as complex an operation as might be expected. You would also get the goodness of the BBOS10 UI built in with no additional development. There are other options as well like fully native code and HTML5 etc....
Now, I know what you are thinking. Here is some BlackBerry fanboy trying to evangelize DeLorme. That not really the case here. I just like companies that are really driven by a focused determination to produce the best product they can for their marketplace. That's why I carry products from companies like DeLorme and Suunto instead of G branded products. That's also why I have been impressed by the reinvention that BlackBerry has done to itself over the last year. In my mind I see a lot of similarities in their target markets and they way the companies approach their customers."
I have considered a DeLorme for my boat but have not purchased one due to the lack of a BlackBerry application.
Posted via CB10
I will say that the new InReach SE is not as dependent on a smartphone for full functionality as the older InReach. It has a full display and you can compose messages from it. I'm switching from a Spot Messenger to the SE. But I also have a DeLorme PN60SE GPS. Its is much better as a GPS than a smartphone and its waterproof to boot!